City runs regular Learning and Teaching Forums on a range of different subjects – these are open to anyone who’s interested, so PhD students are very welcome to come along. The format is usually a combination of presentations and activities. To give you an idea of what happens, you can take a look at the blog post I wrote about the most recent one which addressed the topic of classroom management. Here, we discussed something that’s a concern to people with all levels of experience of teaching, but can be a particular worry when you’re starting out, especially if you’re not sure if your status as a PhD student might affect how seriously students take your attempts at discipline (I know this is something that worried me). You might want to take a look at the slides that we used, or the Padlet where we shared solutions for common scenarios. I think the slide about ‘learned optimism’  provides a useful concept to think about if you might have a tendency to get into negative thought patterns about student behaviours (such as ‘everyone looks bored so I must be a boring teacher’ or ‘people are talking so I’m rubbish at controlling a class’). It’s similar to some of the things we talked about during the Establishing a Teaching Persona course – challenging the veracity of these generalisations or catastrophisations so that you can step back from the situation a little and reflect on a more balanced view of what went well and badly, which should mean that dealing with classroom issues becomes a bit more manageable.

The next Learning and Teaching Forum will be on the subject of play-based learning, 12-13:30 on Thursday 4th July – more details here. If this is something you think you might want to start doing in your teaching (or perhaps are already doing) then please do come along – it also involves a free lunch which is never a bad thing! Hope to see you there.